The White House is slashing the deadline for government agencies and organizations to adopt new encryption systems resistant to quantum attacks, as the federal government seeks to protect decades of secrets belonging to the military, banks, governments, and most individuals on Earth.
The executive order, titled Securing the Nation from Advanced Cryptographic Attacks, requires computer systems for “high-value assets” and “high-impact systems” to transition to post-quantum cryptographic keying systems by December 31, 2030, and to quantum-secure digital signature systems by December 31, 2031.
Countering a Significant Threat
The new deadline, which for many organizations is about five years earlier than the previous one, follows recent research showing that the resources and costs required to build a cryptographically relevant quantum computer are much lower than previous consensus estimates. In response, Google, Cloudflare, and other companies have recently tightened their deadlines for removing vulnerable systems to 2029.
“The advent of large-scale quantum computers, particularly in the hands of adversaries, will pose a significant threat to widely used cryptographic security systems,” Monday’s executive order said. “Continued cyber activity against our nation also poses the risk that adversaries will collect information about the United States now and decrypt it later, once large-scale quantum computers are operational.”
Accelerated Transition Timeline
Under a timeline released by the National Security Agency in 2022, “national security systems” — a class comprising only defense and intelligence systems under the agency’s authority — were to be quantum-ready between 2030 and 2033. Most other organizations had until 2035 to complete the transition. Now, many of them will have to make the transition much sooner.
“So for any system that falls into this new category of high-value assets and high-impact systems, their transition timelines have been shortened by 4-5 years (from 2035 to 2030/2031),” Brian LaMacchia, a crypto engineer who oversaw Microsoft’s post-quantum transition from 2015 to 2022 and now works at Farcaster Consulting Group, told Ars. “This is a significant shortening of the transition timeline for these systems, and follows similar timeline revisions from Google and Cloudflare that we saw announced in late March/early April.”
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